BANGKOK — An organization of relatives of passengers and crew members who were aboard Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 when it vanished nearly two years ago has accused the Malaysian government of legal maneuvering that could deny them compensation from the airline.

With the approach of a March 8 deadline for filing suit against the airline — the second anniversary of the ill-fated flight — some family members and lawyers contend that Malaysia’s recent restructuring of the struggling national carrier could leave it without sufficient assets to compensate them.

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Workers searching for possible debris near the area where an airplane part had washed up on the island of Réunion in July 2015.CreditBen Curtis/Associated Press

“The government is trying to protect one of its businesses instead of allowing its citizens access to justice,” said Grace Nathan, a lawyer in the capital, Kuala Lumpur, whose mother was on the aircraft and who represents Voice 370, a support group for family members of passengers and crew members.

Flight 370 was headed north from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people aboard when the aircraft, a Boeing 777, sharply altered course, turning west across the Malay Peninsula and then south for hours over the Indian Ocean, where investigators believe it ran out of fuel and crashed.

The cause of the disappearance remains a mystery. One piece of wreckage, a wing part known as a flaperon, washed up in July on the distant island of Réunion in the Indian Ocean, but a lengthy ocean search has turned up no other debris from the plane.

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Arunan Selvaraj, center, a lawyer representing about a dozen Flight 370 claimants, and his associates in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, on Thursday.CreditJoshua Paul/Associated Press

Malaysia Airlines was facing losses even before the plane’s disappearance. Late in 2014, Malaysia’s Parliament passed legislation restructuring the company, forming a new entity, Malaysia Airlines Berhad, to take over the carrier. The law also established new rules for compensation lawsuits, according to lawyers involved in the cases.

Arunan Selvaraj, a lawyer representing about a dozen Flight 370 claimants, said the law had put the family members at a disadvantage. “Malaysia Airlines Berhad is a totally different entity,” he said. “They are transferring the liability. By the time people file their suits, there will be nothing left in Malaysia Airlines.”

But Malaysia’s transport minister, Liow Tiong Lai, said in an interview on Friday that the restructuring would not affect any compensation awarded to passengers’ or crew members’ relatives because the airline’s insurance would cover costs. “It should not be of any concern,” he said. “The insurance company is also responsible.”

Relatives who are not satisfied with the current negotiations have the right to sue the airline, he said. There has been a flurry of filings in recent days, and more suits are expected before the March 8 deadline. The Montreal Convention, the international agreement that governs the resolution of airline disputes, requires that lawsuits seeking such compensation be filed within two years.

Many Flight 370 family members have been unhappy with Malaysia’s handling of the disaster and its aftermath, expressing fears that the cause of the plane’s disappearance may never be known. Some of them say that the government has not been forthcoming in its dealings with the families and hope that lawsuits against the airline will produce more information about what happened.

Ms. Nathan said some family members are irked by a requirement under the new rules that they get permission from the company before they can file suit. They say the company has used that authority to keep them from naming other government agencies as defendants, such as the Department of Civil Aviation or the Ministry of Transport.

Mr. Selvaraj said he had filed suit in one Flight 370 case before February 2015, when the new rules took effect, naming government agencies as well as the airline as defendants. Under the new rules, he said, he has faced more obstacles as he has sought permission to file suit on behalf of newer clients.

“We sued all the parties,” he said. “By doing that, we expose a lot of other things. Now it’s really unfair for them to dictate to us who to sue, and where to sue and to get their consent.”

The compensation procedures used in the Flight 370 cases would also apply to relatives of the 298 people who died when another Malaysia Airlines plane, Flight 17, was shot down over Ukraine four months later, Ms. Nathan said.

Malaysia Airlines did not respond to questions about how the restructuring of the airline could affect compensation. But the company’s administrator, Mohammad Faiz Azmi, said in a statement this week that he had granted 96 requests from next of kin to file suit, and that no requests had been rejected. An additional 42 families have collected “full compensation,” he said.

Mr. Azmi reiterated the airline’s “continued commitment to uphold all its obligations” to people affected by the flight’s disappearance, and he said that the airline had insurance coverage in place to meet its compensation obligations, as required by international conventions. He encouraged all family members who had not filed claims to do so by March 8.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A5 of the New York edition with the headline: Families Accuse Malaysia of Contriving to Deny Compensation in Case of Lost Jet . Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe